An official from these camps has gone on record to explain what goes on:

“We have to use military-style methods such as total immersion and physical training on these young people. We need to teach them some discipline and help them to establish a regular lifestyle.”

This includes providing camouflage, army-style uniforms, disciplined bedtimes and two hours of physical training. This all coexists with psychological training, traditional Chinese philosophy and calligraphy classes. It’s definitely nothing resembling fun.

Last week, a group of inmates at the Huai’an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre decided that they’d finally had enough of the “monotonous work and intensive training”. Working as a team, they tied their duty supervisor to his bed and made a run for it. These 14 patients were aged 15 to 22, and they proceeded to hail a taxi to take them to a nearby town in east China’s Jiangsu province. They were discovered when the driver became suspicious of the identically-dressed young men who were unable to pay the fare. The driver dropped them off at the police station instead.

The Chinese government avidly supports these centers and even released a white paper on the topic, detailing their commitment to the “online safety” of their minors and promising to take measures to prevent young people “overindulging in the internet.” But treatment centers’ methods were questioned last year when a 15 year old boy was admitted to a training camp, only to be beaten to death hours after his admittance. The instructors involved in that incident were recently sentenced to 10 years in prison, but very few changes to prevent this occurring again have been publicized by the government. Courtesy of gamepron.com/news

Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign- the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain- was quoted as saying, “Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event.” It’s even more surprising because of the fact that for most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, very few people even knew what a dotcom was. The exact genesis of the dotcom name is unknown, but it certainly arrived at a time when there was a need for some sort of organising principles, as more bodies connected to the fledgling internet.

The early internet was not at all seen as a place for commerce as it is now, but was mainly used as a means for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas. There’s general agreement that a turning point occured with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape. This allowed mainstream consumers on to the web. And now, with 668,000 dotcom sites registered every month, they have become part of the fabric of our lives.

25 years after their creation, people go to dotcom sites for shopping, entertainment, vacation planning, connecting with friends, learning new things and exchanging ideas. The dotcoms have enjoyed an impressive growth rate that would have been very difficult to predict 25 years ago, when a small computer firm took the first steps towards connecting the world. Courtesy of news.bbc.co.uk

Courtesy of slashdot.com

1. The attacker socially engineers a victim, often in an overseas office, to visit a malicious website.

2. This website uses a browser vulnerability to load custom malware on the initial victim’s machine.

3. The malware calls out to a control server, likely identified by a dynamic DNS address.

4. The attacker escalates his privilege on the corporate Windows network, using cached or local administrator credentials.

5. The attacker attempts to access an Active Directory server to obtain the password database, which can be cracked onsite or offsite.

6. The attacker uses cracked credentials to obtain VPN access, or creates a fake user in the VPN access server.

7. At this point, the attack varies based upon the victim. The attacker may steal administrator credentials to access production systems, obtain source code from a source repository, access data hosted at the victim, or explore Intranet sites for valuable intellectual property.’ The report also has pages of recommendations as well as lessons learned, which any systems administrator — even those inside the US — should read and take note of.

Courtesy of slashdot.com

Courtesy of slashdot.com

Manufacturers have already begun building phones featuring Windows Phone 7 Series with plans for release by the 2010 holiday season, according to Microsoft. Manufacturers on board include Dell, Garmin, Asus, HTC, Hewlett-Packard, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba.

Carrier partners include AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, and Vodafone.

Microsoft did not announce its own phone hardware. However, the software giant is working more closely than it has in the past with manufacturing partners in the design process of their phone hardware. For example, each Windows 7 Series phone will include a dedicated hardware button to access Microsoft’s Bing search tool with one click.

“In a crowded market filled with phones that look the same and do the same things, I challenged the team to deliver a different kind of mobile experience,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, in a press statement. “Windows Phone 7 Series marks a turning point toward phones that truly reflect the speed of people’s lives and their need to connect to other people and all kinds of seamless experiences.”

Courtesy of wired.com

“Our goal is to demonstrate how cloud computing can be a tool to enable our Air Force to manage, monitor and secure the information flowing through our network,” said Lieutenant General William Lord, chief information officer for the military branch.

Cloud computing has grown increasingly popular as businesses cut costs and technology maintenance woes by essentially renting software applications hosted online instead of buying and installing programs on their own machines.

The Air Force has contracted IBM to develop a private cloud computing “architecture” that improves “all operational, analytical and security capabilities,” according to Lord.

IBM said the 10-month-project will “push the technology boundaries” of cloud computing to tailor a system for a military network that includes nine major commands, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active personnel worldwide.

A key component of the system will be “stream computing” that couples sensors and monitors to quickly analyze flowing data for “actionable insights” into cyberattacks or network problems, according to IBM.

“This instant access to information would enable Air Force officials to automatically shift the prevention environment based on rules-based protocols in the event of a cyberattack or network anomalies,” IBM said.

In what might seem a page from science fiction, the system will also feature “autonomic computing” allowing it to “retune itself” without human intervention.

Courtesy of Yahoo! News

Courtesy of slashdot.org

Courtesy of Slashdot.org

Courtesy of slashdot.com